Dr. Boleslaw K. Szymanski presented a paper titled “Community Detection with Edge Augmentation in Criminal Networks” co-authored by Ashwin Bahulkar, Nail O. Baycik, and Thomas C. Sharkey of RPI at the Social Network Analysis and Application Workshop, a part of the 2018 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM) in Barcelona, Spain, August 28, 2018. The excerpt from the abstract is provided here. The paper focuses on community detection in criminal networks and address the problem caused by intentionally hidden edges which hinder the performance of community detection. The authors use link prediction to demonstrate how the community structure of a network can be better identified by augmenting it with edges. The authors demonstrate the value of this method by showing this method delivers us better quality communities for real life drug trafficking networks. The paper contains also a discussion of the limitations of the approach, and importance of community detection for investigating of criminal networks.

The paper has been published in the Proceedings of ASONAM and is available at the link provided below.